The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #151193   Message #3527095
Posted By: Marje
16-Jun-13 - 01:22 PM
Thread Name: Have you the necessary qualifications?
Subject: RE: Have you the necessary qualifications?
I've heard that at least 60% of statistics are just made up :-)

But seriously, a good survey will apply proper techniques and come up with some valid findings. Unfortunately many people think that creating a survey is a doddle and just write down a list of questions, without any thought to precision, clarity, bias, use of jargon, etc, let alone how they're going to find a representative group of people to survey. Multi-choice questions give responses that are easy to collate, but it's a difficult sort of question to set, as it may (as in this case) not give all the options necessary, or may not be clear and unambiguous.

"Qualitative research", where you allow free-text responses for respondents' own ideas, are often enjoyed by the participants, but are the hardest of all to analyse. Making sense of such responses is a research skill on its own.

That's why amateur surveys may often fail to find out anything useful, and just cause bewilderment among people being surveyed.

Marje